User blog:Mgrazebrook/Ethelred vs Mean Machine
Introduction Ethelred went to war - single handedly - against the game's top alliance. Honours were roughly even - Ethelred lost about 2/3 million might and destroyed about the same. Long in the planning and one day in the fighting, this is an account of that war. I'd welcome your comments! Planning and Preparation Ethelred joined the game intending to build a position and then topple the leading players if he could. When battle was joined, he was the 6th ranked player with about 1 million might. The primary opponents had about 8 million might between them. The plan was to identify the bases of the top few players and attack from close range. To do this, Ethelred kept his 4th city deed unused. The day before the attack he captured 5 plains which had 18 of the top ranking players castles within a range of 10. To each city site he moved wagons with 100k of each resource. He also saved the resource tokens you get from invitations. Thus Ethelred hoped to create his 4th city in 5 places, one after another. To prepare the attack, Ethelred kept records of the might his selected victims. The leaderboard provides a daily snapshot. The rest he manually checked on the map every few hours the day before the attack and in the covert stage of the attack. You can see patterns - some players have periods where their might doesn't change, or changes in lumps which look like the construction of a big building. A couple of players had their might increasing so continuously one wondered if they did anything else! He made a half-hearted attempt to seek food-producing wilds. But this wasn't much fun. Ethelred intended to spend an hour building each castle and trashing everything within range. Then he'd spend half an hour abandoning and relocating the 4th city. Starting after breakfast and having the day off, his victims should arrive home from work to find the wreckage. It didn't quite work out like that. Covert war It was time to leave the alliance which had nurtured his early growth so peaceful players would not get hurt in an alliance war. This was to be a giant-slaying excersise. One small player decided to help out, mostly by speeding builds as part of a temporary alliance Ethelred had spottted a major player who'd been inactive for a couple of days. Better still, Jay was the titular head of Mean Machine! A symbolic place to start! With a couple of alllies speeding things along, it took about an hour to create a castle with a lvl 4 rally point, lvl 2 watch tower, lvl 1 relief station and lvl 1 storehouse. Everywhere else was covered in lvl 1 barracks so militia could be recruited locally, an enjoyable but pointless flourish. It was time for the attack to begin. Jay was in sanctuary (a wise move) so his wall defences could be systematically dismantled with suicide militia and massed heavy cavalry for the spikes. But Jay's army - otherwise a tempting amount of might to destroy - was safe. Heavy cavalry also seemed effective for taking out crossbows though there may be better ways to do this. Anticipating great booty, Ethelred had made his first big mistake. He'd sent along lots of supply troops and wagons. And to make matters worse, he sent the booty back on a supply mission not re-assignment! So while the cavalry could zip accross the board in about 15 minutes, the supply troops took 1h30 there - and back - and there again - and back again at last. Reducing all enemy in an area and shipping the loot home took 6 hours instead of 1 hour! In hindsight, 25k mixed heavy and light cavalry can transport around 4 million resource per journey. Ethelred could just have kept the best and ditched the rest. The next problem was a possible bug: the 4th castle would not delete! The castle ended up in limbo, not on the map, not able to send or receive troops, but still otherwise working. Did Ethelred still have some expendable troops marching, and did they prevent the castle being abandoned until they got home? In any case, a couple of hours later it suddenly became possible to re-place castle 4. The battle plan was now some 7 hours behind schedule. Learning from that mistake, he still managed a second local base - next to iOWNdope. Another player was looted and wall defences destroyed before the covert phase was over. Wisely he too was in sanctuary. Skirmshing with scouts Before the final battle was joined, a lot of scouting was done by both sides. This was as much to kill scouts as to gain information. Ethelred allocated about 1/4 of his scouts to defend cities. In theory they would dodge out of the way if too many scouts were incoming. But sometimes sheer information overload combined with terrible lag times in the evening. In this attack Keep'_guessing succeeds in killing one batch. Scouts can be handy for knocking out undefended caltrops. With militia, the defender might have time to take appropriate action. For example 897 scouts took out 840 caltrops for an inexplicable loss of 2 scouts. Attacking militia can be handy for scout-killing. Keep_guessing was being particularly effective with his scouting. So something must be done! 5000 militia did their duty and died as they always do ... but took out 8648 scouts and 299 traps, a fair exchange. In a big alliance war it might be a good opening move to attack every enemy city with a few thousand militia. This will put the enemy into a panic, kill many scouts before they can be used, and take down enough wall defences to be worthwhile. With every city showing red it's harder to spot the real attacks. This could also be fun for small players in an alliance as anyone can put together such a force. If someone scouts in force, force you don't want to meet, this is a wonderful time to scout them. Keep_guessing sent in 45k scouts so Ethelred thought this would be a super time to scout the city they came from. But he got the logic back to front - you have to send your scout mob when the enemy scouts are on their way in, not home. He knew it was a disaster the moment he clicked on the attack screen - there was a ghastly moment of hope while the window just hung there, stuck with the lag, and one could hope for one of those error messages ... 12k scouts died but took 3k with them. Scout vs scout battles almost always have casualties. The lag was a problem in other ways. Sometimes scouts would arrive without the city ever having shown as being under attack. Final defence At last Mean Machine prepared for a massive and fairly well coordinated attack on the homeland of their enemy. Thanks to sanctuary the defender can pick his battles. There's no shame in using sanctuary! Spikes are useless unless defended. In this battle Robert the Brave lives up to his name. Spikes are destroyed for no loss. I think a token archer fighting in defence would have made them dangerous. As a result there were some crushing defeats for Mean Machine in the early stages. This is a battle in which TheFlo lost 80,000 archers. Some points are interesting: the defender has no attack or defence bonus, though these should have both been 20%. Not sure why. The caltrops do a good job. The spikes are untouched as there is only infantry. The archers concentrate principally on the cavalry. And the defending scouts should have been sent away - a common error. The Flo fought with great courage and bore the brunt of the MeanMachine losses. Some battles are best declined. Here TheFlo takes out wall defences supported by token troops. (The token troops seem to make the walls fight better.) Notice the massive damage to the cavalry and war machines partly due to the spiked barriers. It may be better to take down walls in two stages - pure infantry and pure heavy cavalry. And in this attack Lancelot devestates the wall defences but squanders his cavalry Lancelot put in the fatal blow. He attacked with 100k archers. He had more - was this a clever play to tempt Ethelred to fight? Ethelred chose to defend with 34k archers, 9k HC, 150 of each war machine, 5k crossbows plus odds and ends. Ethelred's remaining military force was wiped out for a loss of 60k of Lancelot's archers. Ethelred gambled that the HC and crossbows are worth about 4 archers each. This is probably about right. But another factor comes into play which I think explains the result: the archers concentrate on the cavalry first, so if they aren't there in sufficient numbers, they die for little effect. This was the wrong fight to pick: there were large later attacks incoming which Ethelred's army could have destroyed with small losses. An expensive victory but a crucial one. Aftermath Once the final defences were gone, the Mean Machine sent in various looting and scouting attacks. Often there was little one could do. These attacks lasted for several hours with the later ones often smaller and less organised. But resistance is not over even when the army is gone! Builds in progress are not cancelled. So one can build traps for attacking forces. Sometimes this is literally traps - you can time them to hit a larger incoming force, killing small numbers of archers. Or one can time a set of builds to meet a threat. For example at 01:05 TheFlo lost 570 wagons against 300 pike + 462 HC, newly built. No loss on my side. On one occasion I tried to set a trap for 5040 cavalry RobertTheBrave sent: 100 crossbows were about to complete. I timed an additional build of 15 spiked barriers and reinforced with new builds (1000 & 462 HC). I misjudged it: Robert won losing 1054 cavalry. A typical aftermath attack was TheFlo with 8k archers + 1500 wagons. A well-timed spike build could strip the wagons as they don't interact with archers. Spikes only seem to work if there's a shooting troop fighting with them - 1 sacrificial archer is perfect. Were I to fight the battle again this is what I'd do: At the point where my armies are defeated, put in exactly 2 hours of builds everywhere: that's about 250 spiked barriers and 2000 pike. The enemy will be committed to a number of aftermath attacks arriving around that time. 6k pike + spikes can strip the wagons off an infantry army or defeat a smallish cavalry army. At the end Ethelred had lost all military power but retained about 2k wagons. Some were filled with resources worth saving and sent to garrison a wild. The rest reduced the product incoming attacks could loot. Around 2AM GMT there was nothing left to fight for. Ethelred had a good chat with several of his opponents and the Mean Machine agreed all attacks would cease. Category:Blog posts